Information Literacy in Environmental Engineering

We teach information literacy skills in the introductory course Humanities 101 with the hope that these skills would be carried over to future courses that students take at NJIT. We are obviously a tech school so nobody comes here to major in English literature, but the information gathering skills obtained in that course should be applied when students write papers in science and engineering courses later in the curriculum. I gave a lecture to ENE 262, Introduction to Environmental Engineering. The students worked in teams to write papers on the following topics:

• Differences between bottled and tap water
• Disinfection of drinking water
• State of the art in landfill design
• Carbon Footprints of Transportation Vehicles
• Reuse of water

When I analyzed the papers for use of information literacy skills, I made the following observations:

• Although I stressed the use of Scopus and Scifinder Scholar when I lectured, the use of these databases seemed to be minimal

• Most students did use web sites instead of peer reviewed journals

• Most of the web sites in the bibliographies were from government agencies.

• One student listed two books in his bibliography that were not found in the NJIT Library catalog. When I checked those books in Worldcat, I found out that they were classified as juvenile literature.

• Several students thought that Science Direct, a database, was the name of a journal

• Most of the citations to web sites were not formatted correctly.

I think these observations will be helpful in revising the Research Roadmaps in the future. We have to teach students the difference between a journal and a database. We also need to handout information reviewing the proper way to cite sources in advanced information literacy classes.